skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that there are rose-tinted spectacles at work here, but I don't think modern software is as great as all that.

Today's version of a blue screen might be something in us-east-1 being down again and taking half the software on the Internet offline with it, but the effect is much the same, and now you can't necessarily do anything about the outage, you just have to wait until whoever is responsible for the failed infrastructure to decide your problem is important enough to fix next.

It's not just cloud, either. I recently had a combination of two popular pieces of software, both widely used by professional programmers, where a plugin was crashing the host application when even basic functionality was triggered. The problem was sufficient that I had to abandon using them and ended up writing that program in a different programming language because it was faster than messing around with broken tools. It turns out that some of these much-touted modern standards for interoperability and portability aren't all that great after all.

And of course, while we don't get a literal blue screen any more, it's not as if Windows 10 and several other popular operating systems don't frequently break users' devices, sometimes catastrophically, when rolling out updates. We've just come to expect (by which I really mean, been forced to accept) this culture of shoving broken stuff out and fixing it later, even in the most essential software like our operating systems.

Meanwhile, the last time I saw significant instability on any desktop OS prior to quite recently, I think I was running Windows 95. So maybe the spectacles aren't that rose-tinted after all.
My take is that programming languages have an inadequate ratio between abstract and concrete data flows.

You are supposed to build code by stitching together commands for all the data handling functions required to handle each case in the data. Yet development environments make it really hard to actually _see_ what effect the functions are having on the data. You need to enter a special debug mode and place strategic breakpoints, logs and watched expressions, instead of making easy to compare the full program state before and after executing each function.

In that respect, spreadsheets and reactive functional languages make it easier to prototype new software fast, since they have close together both functions and the data on which the functions operate; and in spreadsheets, you also get the intermediate steps for chains of functions.
The guy teaches at UW now, it's not Stanford but its definitely Big Head's plot.
I love split, ortho, QMK, but I just prefer the feel of rubberdome...
So Emby is now closed source? Wow. I didn't get that message. Not that I really care about that for a media server, but it's still strange that I didn't realize that.

I think that the main problem with Plex (some of those are the same as Emby) are:

* They are trying to add too many features (Plex Arcade? really?) while other features are not stable - chromecast queuing was working then not working then working again with every other release. In the end it stopped working for a while, and I quit using Plex. I just need something to have my collection organized, with a bit of metadata handling and a "watched/not watched" flag. Plex (and Emby) are trying to do an incredible amount of work on top of that.

* The price for the "deluxe" version is too steep for a self hosted solution. Netflix Standard is EUR 144/year, Plex is 40 EUR/year (about the same as Emby, btw). And I need to provide hardware, electricity, and content - it's just not competitive. I'd be happy to pay something between 10 and 20 EUR per year for a properly working software of that kind.
Work and being useful is an essential part of most anarcho-communist proposals. There may be some primitivists who think that civilization was a mistake and we should go back to hunting and gathering, but even hunting and gathering is work.
That is neat the random fading text, wonder the insights gleaned from this.
What I'm missing is Electron-everything. Teams as an electron app has made my Linux Laptop (with everyone in lockdown) our prime machine, everybody has an account, all with their own Teams account set up. Soon we will have Office365 in Electron. Then Adobe tools. And then we can do all the things Windows can do (with a grain of salt) and more.

Sure, this will receive a lot of hate (Electron eat ram mmkay). In the mean time I'm having MS Office on Linux. Real and official. What a time to be alive.
> And I'd personally much rather have this small group of people outletting their anger onto the internet instead of IRL

IRL they're limited physically to whoever they can reach; online they can make their hate travel the world ( point in case, there were QAnon related actions in Germany! If the Q people had been purely IRL that would have never happened)
Vegan ‘dairy’ products face EU ban from using milk cartons
Message Retention Policies in Matrix
I don't think this is related to the country of the editor. The lack of ethics is more preponderant in low-quality reviews (many junk reviews are Asian) and in some domains (more in medical reviews than mathematics).

Here is an example that even the highest profile journal can lack ethics: circa 2005, Nature published a paper comparing a selection of scientific articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The editorial board of Nature selected the articles and sent them to reviewers. They only publishes metrics and a few quotes of their data (the list of selected articles and the reviews). The results were surprising and made a lot of buzz. But Britannica noted that one of these quotes was a sentence that was not it their encyclopedia. Nature had to admit that they selected some Wikipedia articles, and when they could not find the equivalent Britannica article, they sometimes built it by mixing articles and adding a few sentences of their own. Obviously, the process were totally biased, from the selection to the publication.
It was pretty soon after Synfig Studio (2D animation tool) was open sourced when folks started working on the code.

Tilt Brush is a much less obscure tool than Synfig was at the time, I assume there are lots of folks who would jump on this.
pretty sure that mobile and the inclusion of masses of tech-unsavy users is responsible.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a lot of material on so-called experts vetted by other experts whose accuracy is no better than a chimp throwing darts.
Most web is text and uses javascript only for google analytics, nothing essential.
You can also do arbitrage between exchanges with HFT. The faster a trade completes the lower the spread.
How do you measure that?

What do Australians do that the rest of us in Europe don't?
Technically; people can't post to thedonald.win either. It has been closed down too.
Python’s philosophy is supposed to be “one obvious way to do it”, not “you decide which way to do it, it’s optional”.
Would love to learn everything about the clock. Why did you have it in the first place?
Yes, but it's too bad it creates litter wherever you run it. I'd rather it stored all those logs under ~/.cache/ like the other well behaved utilities, in text files like it does or in a searchable SQLite database.
BTRFS blew up under my feet in July 2019 (Archlinux, up-to-date at the time). Sure, I powered down the machine with its reset switch, but it borked the FS; it refused to mount RW and some of my files were inaccessible. Even though it had been some ~3 years with no issues whatsoever, btrfs still isn't up-to-par with ZFS' stability.

Good thing I had syncthing running.
I don't know that it takes that long to build software.

That is, the expectation that software be immediately available because you can vaguely imagine what it would do for you is strange.
I'd be more interested to know if they are interested in financing experiments in anarcho-communism, if they are such enthusiasts.

Perhaps we could also have a techno-monastery, as described by Neil Stephenson in Anathem?
Portugal blocks remote lessons at private schools to help state pupils
But experience with one language tranfers quite well to a new one. I also see a deep problem from the business side, that a programmer is easily replaceable ot that just by throwing more (mediocre) people at the problem will help solve it faster, or even the existence of rock-star developers.

Building software is slow, because essential complexity. We are writing programs that no one person can hold in their heads. And based on the average CRUD app, it might not be trivial (even though they are already increasingly complex), but more complex applications really can take multiple years/decades to create. And it is a bit sad that there is little focus on reuse, even though that is the only silver-bullet out there. No language, no tool; but (high-quality) libraries.
No, this is upside down.

The entire point of the situation is that the nuances are not hugely relevant in the big picture.

Moreover, the nuances are never catered to in cancel culture anyhow.

Nothing remotely significant happened in this situation that should have involved anything other than maybe some stern retorts on the medium she started on i.e. Twitter.

The commenter thinking that 'this was a good outcome' gives us a great example of the vindictive pettiness and overreaction of cancel culture.

You don't lose your job and livelihood for a possibly distasteful public remark, probably taken out of context.

It's actually a pretty great example of the stupidity of cancel culture.
> Just a reminder that Newsweek ceased publication back in 2013, and the rights to its brand were purchased by an odd Christian sect, somewhat along the lines of The Washington Times and the Reunification Church.

Cite?

EDIT:

Seems like this comment is false if wikipedia is to believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...

> The Manhattan District Attorney's office raided Newsweek's headquarters in Lower Manhattan on January 18, 2018, and seized 18 computer servers as part of an investigation related to the company's finances.[64] IBT, which owned Newsweek, had been under scrutiny for its ties to David Jang,[64] a South Korean pastor and the leader of a Christian sect called "the Community".[65]

Would not be surprising really, given what the comment is intended to do.

Waiting for that citation.
i have been thinking a lot about this problem. society has innumerable unsolved problems in healthcare, and many talented people who would like to contribute but cannot.

in software, the open-source model allows people to advance critical initiatives without quitting their day jobs or making onerous commitments.

how can we achieve the same in healthcare, that is let outsiders contribute and advance the state of the art?
With QMK firmware you can reduce the number of keys required for actions like you describe. I similarly use some keybinds that are ctrl + super + a letter. I bound a key on my Pinky4 to act as ctrl-super in one, and to also work like a sticky key, so I press it once, release, and then press a letter. A huge comfort upgrade.
> Keynes dangerously underestimated Germany’s economic capacity to bear the cost of war reparations; as a result, those predicting again and again Germany’s economic collapse were caught off guard when the country proved able not only to withstand the terms of the treaty but also to thrive during a decade of military and industrial development.

What? The reparations were cut over and over again due to Germany not meeting its obligations. And partly due to the fact that Keynes voice was actually heard.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations)

> The Treaty of Versailles [...] required Germany to pay 132 billion gold marks [...].
Between 1919 and 1932, Germany paid less than 21 billion marks in reparations.

And why does it stop in 1932, because the year after the Nazis came into power and rejected to pay.
I wonder when the "thrive during a decade of military and industrial development" was, since Germany was prohibited to have a thriving military by said Treaty. I can only presume after the Nazis came into power. Which is literally what Keynes was warning about:

> "Men will not always die quietly," Keynes warned in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," and "in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself."

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/opinion/keynes-economic-c...

> If Keynes’s specific economic predictions couldn’t anticipate what in fact happened between the wars, then what’s left of The Economic Consequences of the Peace?

Sure, let's talk about the hands...
> It's a huge improvement ergonomically

But what if you need to use a mouse? Then what I've found best ergonomically is to use a "rollermouse". But I don't feel that works well with a split keyboard, and then I prioritize the mouse. (For me my elbow is the biggest issue)
It depends. Off by one errors are common, but the context is important. Some languages for example prefer integrators to indexing, and if ‘a’ was an index that might have been avoided.

Languages with algebraic data types also allow you to express state in ways that can make it easier to identify state changes, possibly making the missing increment more obvious.

Some languages will warn when variables are being used or modified in scopes where they are referenced but not used.

But, even with all this, yes bugs will still happen.
There is a rendering problem in my browser (firefox with custom larger fonts): the textarea where you are supposed to enter text is half-cropped by the boundary of the window at the center.
Oooof I was assuming it was a different Maddie. But yes that's the most famous Maddie in the UK. Might be a coincidence though. It feels like it was over ten years the Maddie you're thinking of disappeared while on holiday

(Edit: looked it up) Maddie McCann disappeared in may 2007
You're absolutely right - the big question of the day is not just "how do we counter disinformation?" but "how do we counter it at scale?" The bad-faith actors of the world have realized how incredibly cost effective disinformation is in an online world that can massively amplify messages, and which algorithmically selects for divisiveness and "engagement" rather than factually and utility. We need a CAPTCHA for truth - but I'm not sure such a thing is even possible without AGI. So what does that leave us with - making algorithmic message amplification illegal? Putting that genie back in the bottle isn't going to be easy, so we'd need to be damn sure it's the right thing to do, to ever drum up enough support to get legislation like that passed.
I like the idea that each Culture society, such as a large ship or orbital, has a copy of the entire knowledge-base of the Culture, as well as the technical means to manufacture anything that the entire Culture knows about.
A lot of accidental complexity arises from adding more people to the mix. There is the communication overhead to deal with. Even when things go well this consumes time. When it doesn't: more time. Then there's of course the constant arguing and bickering over what is best; more people means more opinions on this. And of course the more people you have the more complexity gets introduced. Conway's law is a thing.

The benchmark for me is what I think I can pull off in a few days vs. what I would build with a whole team in a few months. You can build a lot in a weekend. But not not with a whole team around you questioning every move. So, when I need quick results, I give the right people a lot of freedom and not too many distractions and see what happens.

I'm building a new webapp for a startup with a few people since three weeks. We're launching with customers next month. That involves a lot of pragmatic decision making and taking on a few risks. Most of the hard choices were made in the first week and at this point the app is starting to look alright.

Here's what we did not do: we had no designers involved. We also had no lengthy meetings about what features we were going to have. We're patching up our existing backend and adding some new features to it.

Otherwise, it's an emergency rebuild of an app that just wasn't good enough (wrong mobile platform, developer is out of the picture, and it's a lot of technical debt and stability issues). I took the decision in December and gave our inexperienced frontend person some guidance to investigate the technologies I picked for him. By December we had a clear idea that this was doable. January we started doing this. That's 3 weeks ago. By now it's largely done. We're adding a few missing features and then we have an MVP that will run on IOS, Android and the web.

If I had a few million, I could not do this any faster. But I'd be able to ship beautifully native apps six months later. If fast is a goal, keep your team lean.
https://discordapp.com/invite/x52Xz3y
You are right, not all is crap. But too many people are not aware how much is crap and are pretty naive about using libraries. I don't think it is an accident, that e.g. the Java universe has uncountable numbers of libraries and Java projects have unbelievable many dependencies and e.g. Lisp has a percived lack of libraries. There are many reasons for that, but also, that Lisp programmers tend to rely on libraries less.
It's astonishing that the value is so high. I use the internet on N devices for probably 12h a day and I can't imagine I'm worth even a positive amount anywhere.

I max out free tiers of OneDrive/DropBox etc, use my free minutes of build time at the dev sites, I use some social media features but I browse Twitter and reddit on custom apps that don't show any ads. I never ever click an ad in an article or search no matter how interesting or relevant.

So if since I'm a net loss, that means that for everyone who is like me, there has to be someone who is an even larger gain for these companies. I have all of those services (Google, fb, twitter) and I'm still pretty sure I provide a negative revenue for all of them. So Someone needs to provide the revenue I don't. It's a scary amount. My internet activity is subsidized by someone who must be doing a scary amount of clicking on the sponsored google results, or something.
In an average replicate (FB, HN, Twitter) tutorial, students can see how with an amazing developer skills, someone creates the finished product from 15 minutes to 2 hours. But, when they try to do the same, it takes days, weeks or months.
And this also applies to an experienced developer; the reason is depth. (How deep to the rabbit hole do we want to go).
There are always hidden complexities, configuration, installations, validations, issues, known obstacles and unknown obstacles; there is time for meetings, negotiations, time for thinking, time for merely trying to come up with the best approach long before we start coding.

A good example from my early career was "just one field in the database", a client says "hey this will take you just 1 minute, why you are arguing with me about this", but that "one field" is so much intertwined that can affect half of the codebase. It means, going through all procedures, views, models, tests, validations, then there is an impact on historical data etc...

Also there is a huge difference between: spike, MVP, and finished product.
Just be aware that it's not always like this, and that some fields are less prone to it than others.

In my 8 years in research mathematics, I didn't see a single case that would come close to this horror show (not that mathematics is free of unethical behavior, of course). Collaborating with biologists, however, I got exposed to a world far more backstabby than I've since experienced in the corporate world.
I would expect similar view to photos of Earth from Moon landings. I would share a tear or twenty if I ever had the chance to see it myself, either of those cases.
Some of them aren't even expensive, I have the cheap R-Go Split mentioned in the list and it's been great for me, someone with wider shoulders and long arms. I finally feel like I can type in a natural position.

Completely agree though, it took me too long and too much complaining to start looking into this area.
There is no chance they would have quit were there no hubub about it. Zero.

They quit likely because they are in a rep-based business and their boss is stained.

The 'mass outrage' is to some extent, outrage on them by virtue of trickle down or association.

The public outrage adds emotional momentum to it.

That the woman did something slightly questionable makes it one of the better examples of cancel culture, because were she to have done truly noting remotely wrong, then none of the actions would have any justification at all. Because there's a shade of possibly bad acting, we see the disproportional response.
I don’t want to sound smartass but building an identical clone of an existing application is very fast and often totally automated. That’s what your compiler chain does.
It's ridiculous to think that that could produce anything good for consumers. The system just didn't work towards that goal. You can't design a fashionable piece of clothing if you have a 5 year plan imposed on you.
> I know it sounds like he’s “poisoning the well,” but this comment answered the question I had in my head. I thought the source was left-leaning but the article had a conservative voice.

Comment contradicts what is in wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek#2018_investigation_an...

Maybe ask for sources before using some random post making unverified claims as confirmation for your own biases.
Just think about building a simple saas website.

What do you need

A marketing page
A dashboard set of elements
A payment system
A billing history, refund, change card, invoice system
A token system
A auth system
A email system or integration with a email provider.
A complaint system
A admin dashboard
A often custom database schema
A analytics system and useage
A log tracker
A cloud infrastructure for hosting
Rate limiting
A api
A event logging system
A marketing blog

I have strayed too far.

My point is each one if these things is usually build from scratch. It takes a lot of time, then you have to wire everything together. In typical custom ways. If someone makes a off the shelf version typically the learning curve is greater than building a custom version.

I think software takes so log because each dev tries to rebuild the wheel. And often times the wheel does need to be rebuilt. But due to time issues things never get finished to the degree you planned and your custom code has been rewritten 10 times and each new feature take a logx longer to not break the old stuff.
I wonder if part of this is because the commercial pressures aren't there, that there is so much money sloshing about the industry that we can get away with sloppy practices.
Wow, after your comment about having the luxury of taking time I wanted to find out how. I found your website in your bio. Very impressive and very cool to see even huge successes find the time to comment on HN.
Sidebar: Wonderful post, but what an awful fake loading bar. Every time I switch from the tab / window to something else and switch back to continue reading I'm interrupted by it for no reason.
> The tools to build a known specification from an existing app are sub-optimal, as are the tools to build a known specification from scratch.

That actually reinforces my point ;-) All the steps in the toolchain could benefit from more agile interactions, allowing the programmer to spend less time fiddling with syntax errors and recalling which functions need to be applied in what order, and more time evaluating and fixing errors in the current logic as written. That would expose what the build program is doing and how it differs from the expected intent.

The online notebooks used in data analysis (Jupyter, Apache Zeppelin) are a step in the right direction; IMHO their approach of 'data is always readable besides the code processing it' makes for a better introspection infrastructure than the REPL loops of old.